Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Religious Freedom, Equality, and Child Abuse

By Sherry Colb

In my Verdict column for this week, I discuss a German court's decision to outlaw non-medical circumcisions of male children. I conclude that the prohibition is under-inclusive relative to similar secular harms that parents inflict on their children. In this post, I want to explore a different sort of under-inclusiveness that we find in the German court's prohibition of circumcision: an under-inclusiveness relative to religious harms that courts and legislatures regularly tolerate, when the religion in question is a dominant one.

What harms does religion inflict? One need not be a devotee of the so-called fundamentalist atheists (such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens) to acknowledge that some religious teachings can cause significant distress in young children. Religious parents frequently teach their offspring that God is watching their every move and surveilling their every thought, searching -- like a CIA agent gone rogue -- for anything sinful. If the search indeed turns up something sinful, then the punishment will in some instances promise to be an eternity of burning in Hell.

For a young child, this threat can be terrifying. Because children have a more difficult time controlling their thoughts and their behavior than adults do, moreover, children are likely to experience intense guilt, shame, and fear about what are really quite ordinary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in growing children.

Depending on the particular religion, examples of commonplace but sinful thoughts and behavior might include doubts about the existence of God, sexual fantasies or dreams about people of the same sex or opposite sex, hatred toward a parent or a teacher, masturbation, and the list goes on. Consider the seven deadly sins within Christian tradition: wrath, pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, and greed. Many of the acts and feelings that religions designate as sinful are among the most common human acts and emotions, and the latter include the seven deadly sins. Adults (perhaps) understand this reality and regard the desire to be without sin as an aspiration rather than a realistic mandate. A child, however, may perceive the inevitability of his own sins as a reflection of something uniquely wrong with him, something that consigns him to eternal agony in damnation after his death.

A religious person might object that Hell is real, and that telling his children about it is the kindest thing he can do to protect them. It might be similarly traumatic for a child to learn about pedophilia, but child sexual abuse is a threat, and keeping this truth from a trusting and vulnerable child might place her in harm's way.

From the perspective of a religious person, then, it is necessarily right to instruct one's children in a manner that will maximize the ability and motivation of those children to conform their behavior to God's will and thereby court Heaven and avoid Hell. From the perspective of a secular person or a member of a religious faith that rejects another religion's particular requirements, by contrast, an action that causes physical or emotional distress and trauma in a child -- religious circumcision or lessons about the consequences of sin in the afterlife -- will look like glorified child abuse. For a Jewish take on religion-as-child-abuse, Shalom Auslander's books make very interesting reading.

It is far too easy, then, for one culture, whether religious or secular, to look critically at the conduct of other cultures, while finding much less obvious the comparable harms perpetrated by its own culture. This is the meaning of "hypocritical" -- being insufficiently critical, when it comes to looking at oneself.

When examining religious practices that seem wrong or abusive, we must accordingly proceed with humility and an awareness of our own shortcomings. This does not mean that we can never judge a religious or cultural practice that falls outside of our own traditions. We must sometimes do so to protect those whom Professor Karima Bennoune has insightfully called "the others' others", individuals who live within a minority community that itself encounters discrimination. But we must do so with care and sensitivity, lest we be guilty of hypocrisy and, thus, of de facto discrimination against those who differ from ourselves.

9 comments:

"[F]undamentalist atheists" are not "so-called", they are intentionally so labeled buy the religious to, among other thing, imply that atheism is somehow just another "belief;" that it is on equal footing with the fantasy found in religious texts. It is a pejorative term and no atheist would ever use it to describe themselves.

As any atheist would tell you, the existence of a God is a scientific question no different in kind than the existence of a frog. If any of the religious actually submitted refutable (but unrefuted) evidence of its existence, atheists would become theists. There is just nothing remotely fundamentalist about atheism.

"A religious person might object that Hell is real..."

Yes, I am sure they might. Our law, generally, has a place for that sort of cognitive defect. Here is a great example:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/03/29/children.slain/

Now, I agree, as a factual matter, that we treat the sort of child abuse brought on by religion generally differently than we treat murder brought on by religion. Personally, for those (an embarrassingly overwhelming majority of our society) that profess to believe in the Judeo/Chistian God, the reasoning for this is unclear. The very "Holy" texts in which they purport to believe contain examples of God ordering parents to kill, torture or sell their children. But no matter. It is clear that when God orders you to kill your children, you still get punished if you do Gods will.

So, sure, preventing parents from doing God's will by mutilating their children is under-inclusive. Personally, the only problem I see here is its failure to go far enough. I look forward to the time when telling your child that an invisible man in the sky is going to punish him/her is criminally punishable. (I'd be really interested to see how long any religion survived if the first whiff a person got of it happened at 18).

Until then, each incremental step that helps fight the most destructive force on our planet seems like a reasonable step in the right direction.

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